Sports Cuts Hit More Than Bottom Line

The kids were getting ready to play their game Tuesday afternoon. A couple of miles away, the adults were debating whether to take away the games.

A sad and dangerous day had arrived in Seminole County. Unless more people start to care, it may be coming to a kid near you.

The school board is considering cutting funds for certain sports. As it held a standing-room-only workshop on the matter, the girls on Seminole High's softball team practiced alone.

To politicians, they are statistics. Then you see a living, breathing number, such as Maureen Priest. She wears goggles, plays left field and knows athletics are much more than a game.

"Softball gets me away from all my problems," she said.

It's easy to pour on the sap and talk about how sports changes lives. But if you doubt it, you've never been around sports.

You've never lived the stories people told the school board. Like the mother who said her son was an introvert with few friends. The confidence he gained from playing football transformed his personality.

There was the kid from the broken home who went home one day after practice and found a very bad scene. To whom did he run for comfort and guidance? His coach.

These are the real success stories of sports. The people that make them happen are guys such as Seminole softball coach David Rogers. On Tuesday, he was manicuring the field he all but built over the past nine years.

"Look around you," Rogers said.

It was a perfect afternoon to be outside. You could hear tennis balls being whacked in the distance. A pitcher was popping fastballs into a catcher's mitt.

Not all this is threatened, at least not yet. The school board is considering cutting many of the piddly $2,659 supplements coaches receive. There's talk of pay-to-play, eliminating non-sanctioned sports, freshman teams. The slope gets slippery pretty fast.

No, learning to be a shot putter isn't as important as learning algebra. But students do better academically when they play sports. And there's no way to weigh the value of state titles, lifelong memories, scholarships won, and life lessons learned on sunny afternoons.

What if they never happened? And what would some kids do if they weren't kept busy in sports? Trouble can start small, and it's a lot cheaper to pay a coach than build another prison.

Everybody at Tuesday's meeting realizes these things, and the potential victims go far beyond sports. If you want to find the villains in this story, a good place to start is Tallahassee.

Florida ranks 49th out of 50 in per-capita spending on education. Good thing Jeb Bush is the "Education Governor," or we'd probably trail Afghanistan.

Some legislators want to roll back the late-'90s tax breaks that cost education $1.1 billion and benefited mostly big business. House Speaker Tom Feeney, who's from Oviedo, said it's just another case of "edu-crats" being whiny.

Way to look out for the kids back home, Mr. Speaker. "They're just not thinking," Priest said.

It's up to you to make them. Write, call or e-mail your legislators. They've heard it before, but they obviously need to hear it again.

There are no easy answers, but there's got to be a better one than making the Maureen Priests of the world go away.